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No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide- ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.

In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel Westa city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity.

In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city’s current status.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Few books shed as much light on their subjects as this opinionated and original excavation of Los Angeles from the mythical debris of its past and future.”—San Francisco Examiner

“A history as fascinating as it is instructive.”—Peter Ackroyd, The Times

About the Author

Mike Davis is the author of several books including Planet of Slums, City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Papa’aloa, Hawaii.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Several years ago I picked this book up on a business trip to L.A. and couldn't put it down. Since then I've become an armchair aficionado of L.A./Southland history and returned to explore the area as often as I can afford. This book has to be compared to the likes of Heidi and Alvin Toffler's "Third Wave" and so forth. It's part essay, part history, and part futurism. As with the "Third Wave" it's full of breathless pronouncements of WHAT HAS BEEN and WHAT WILL BE--except this is more of a dystopian nightmare. Like it or not, L.A. has been the most important city in America--probably the world--since World War Two. This comes thanks to the advent of TV, which sold the world on "fun in the sun." So, if you want to read one grand pronouncement on the darkest possible outcome of modern urban inequality, this is a good one. Just figure it won't turn out as badly as he predicts. Mike Davis is like a stopped clock of the analog variety. He's going to be right twice a day. But it sure is fun to read him going on about it.

City of Quartz is one of the top 20 books I've ever read. It penetrates the fog that so often surrounds how a thing becomes that which we know. In this case, he illuminates the creation and recreation of Los Angeles, as an idea and a built space. Davis nicely combines the materialist eye of a Marxian with the intellectual awareness of a grounded post-modernist to catch both the ways Los Angeles has operated as a vehicle for capital accumulation and been sold as a cure-all and a dream. Los Angeles is explicated as the model for the real estate capitalism that came to play such a dominant part in the American economy (and which all the kings horses and men are still trying to put back together again after 2007) and our automobile-centric consumer culture. Although it plays a part in his narrative, Hollywood and it's "dream machine" do not suck all the air out of the tale. Davis knows the city too well to let Hollywood swallow his story. And he respects it too much to tie it all up in too neat a bow. He leaves space for the reader to consider, contemplate, and draw his own conclusions. I cannot reccomend this book too highly.

I found this really difficult to get through. While Davis's approach is very wide ranging and comprehensive, I often found myself struggling to keep up with all of the historical examples and various people mentioned in this account. Having never been there myself and knowing next to nothing about the area's history, I often felt myself overwhelmed, struggling to keep track of the various people and institutions that helped shape such a fractured, peculiarly American locale. I think it would have helped if I'd read a more general history of the region first before diving into something this intricately informed about its subject

City of Quartz, the original version, is an excellent book on the history of Los Angeles until 1989, well readable, informative and incisive, a must-read even if some people take offense at views which are neither mainstream nor conservative.When you finish the book you are very curious as to how that author would write about the years since 1989.That book still needs to be written.But in an extensive foreword to this new edition many aspects of the most recent history of the most fascinating metropolis on the planet are touched, the Watts riots and whatnot; obviously there is much more and whoever follows what Davis writes in journals about Katrina-torn New Orleans and other hot topics, google his books !, can't wait until a new, extensively updated "City of Quartz" will be out.

Davis is well-known in radical circles as a popular writer on various issues relating to labor movements and the like. This is essentially a history of the city of Los Angeles and its surroundings from a radical perspective. It's quite well-done and very informative (at least to an ignoramus like me), but Davis goes overboard now and then in seeing a conspiracy to repress the poor behind everything. He also has the tendency to call historical incidences of repression a "holocaust" (he actually uses this word multiple times for different things), which I don't like being used in this manner. Aside from that though, it's a welcome different approach from the usual hagiographic or hip postmodern analyses of conglomeration cities like LA. There's not much more I can say about it, as whether you like his left-wing critical vignettes or not will be mostly a matter of taste - judge it for yourself.

Someone from Los Angeles -- or with more knowledge than me -- might quibble with the conclusions Davis reaches or the ways in which he illuminates the city. However, as someone who is not from there and has never even been there, I found this to be a fascinating read about a place, its history, and its current sociology.

I thought his organization is excellent -- covering politics first and then weaving a story through gang culture, neighborhood topography, and religion -- and his writing is vivid. At several points, I found myself wishing books like this were available on other cities across the United States because I learned so much and thought about things so differently upon finishing it.

More About the Author

Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, Planet of Slums, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Papa'aloa, Hawaii.